We have already read a number of narratives
which have included depictions of war. So we should be ready for
what Thucydides is attempting in his famous book. However, it
quickly becomes clear when we read the opening of Thucydides's
History of the Peloponnesian War that the author is very consciously
attempting something different. Thucydides goes to some length
to insist upon this point: his narrative account of contemporary
events is going to be something much better than similar accounts
delivered by his predecessors, and he wants his readers to understand
up front just why that is so.

This discussion raises a number of interesting
questions, not just about Thucydides, but also about the work
of his predecessors, and these questions we can usefully approach
by considering just what Thucydides is doing here in the way of
clarifying a new conception of what we call history. In setting
out his method and his critique of earlier narrative accounts
of past events, that is, Thucydides is making a proud defence
of a new method of telling such stories. And this defence, some
have argued, marks the beginning of a new form of enquiry, history,
as distinguished from, say, myth, romance, epic poetry, and so
forth, other forms of narrative story telling about the past.

In this lecture I would like to explore
some of the implications of the issues raised by Thucydides in
the opening of his famous book. My purpose in so doing is to call
attention to a number of things, in particular, to how Thucydides
is trying to revolutionize the way in which we understand events
by putting them into narrative form and some of the ways this
method is significantly different from other narrative accounts
we have dealt with, for example, in Homer and in the Old Testament.
Thucydides clearly feels that his method is preferable to earlier
ones (I am not suggesting he was familiar with the Old Testament,
by the way) because it will bring human beings closer to an understanding
of the truth of things, rather than deceiving them about the past.
And, for reasons which will emerge later, Thucydides is moved
to insist upon this because he clearly believes that telling a
"true" account of the past events serves a vital moral
purpose.

B. The Methods of History

Thucydides has great contempt for his predecessors'
work (and here he is aiming at Herodotus and Homer) for a number
of reasons. One important factor I would like to focus upon first
is the notion that that earlier work is suspect or "untrue"
because the facts of the story are unverified and unverifiable.
His account, by contrast, is based upon firm evidence, which he
has made considerable effort to check. As he puts it:

But if the evidence cited leads a reader
to think that things were mostly as I have described them, he
would not go wrong, as he would if he believed what the poets
have sung about them, which they have much embellished, or what
the prose-writers have strung together, which aims more to delight
the ear than to be true. Their accounts cannot be tested, you
see, and many are not credible, as they have achieved the status
of myth over time. (12)

What Thucydides is insisting upon here is
something new and important: namely, that the truth of an account
has to answer to the empirical facts, has to have some observable
validity. It is not enough simply that the writer thinks the event
happened or that tradition insists that it happened. There must
exist some evidence independent of the writer to "prove"
the veracity of the event. He does not, it is true, use anything
like a modern convention of references to underscore the validity
of every point he makes, but his opening assurance that he has
gone to the trouble of checking events against observation sets
out the criterion that is going eventually to lead to that modern
convention.

We might observe here, parenthetically,
that, at least so far as Herodotus (Thucydides's great predecessor)
is concerned, Thucydides is not the first to insist upon empirical
verification, for Herodotus tells us a great deal about how he traveled to check his facts, and he obviously feels that it is
important to mention the sources of his information much of the time. However,
Herodotus is generally satisfied to report what people believe
(that they believe something is an interesting fact for him),
without checking the validity of the belief he is reporting. Hence,
he has been called "the father of lies."

But, setting Herodotus to one side, it will
be clear from what we have read in the Old Testament and in Homer,
that this is a radically new demand. Nowhere in Homer or in the
Old Testament selections we have read do the writers call our
attention to the evidence they possess for asserting that such
an event really took place, and we have been wondering ever since
to what extent stories like the Exodus or the Trojan War might
have really happened. A lot of energy has gone into the search
for empirical evidence, since for us, the inheritors of Thucydides's
conception of history, the existence of such evidence is an essential
factor in determining how we react to the story, how we classify it. But the writers
of those narratives evidently did not believe that such things
mattered very much. The fact that the story was old, that people
believed it, and that it was emotionally satisfying (that is,
it embodied certain permanent emotional truths) rendered the narrative
account true.

Thucydides, by contrast, is asserting that
that is not enough. Old stores, no matter how famous and beloved
can lie, can deceive. Hence, the need for some rational check
on their credibility, and that rational check is a basic test
for their empirical truth. Thucydides is not the first to make
this demand, but he is the first to insist upon applying it so
rigorously. And in making this demand he is drawing a firm line
between what we call myth or poetry and something new, history.
For an account to be considered true, to be considered history,
the facts of the story must meet this criterion. Hence, in Thucydides
we meet for the first time a very firm insistence that there are
two kinds of old narratives: myths (which are unreliable, fanciful,
untrue) and accounts like his which are, properly speaking, history,
because they are, in an important new way, true.

To this empirical demand for verification
of the facts, he adds one important stylistic innovation as well,
something which is not so obvious in this text as in the full
account, namely, a scrupulous attention to the temporal sequence of
events. Lacking a coherent and consistent calendar or method for
indicating the passing of time, year by year, Thucydides establishes
a clear time sequence of events with constant reference to the
particular year of the war in which the events took place. This,
too, is a feature of his style of which he is very proud, conscious
of its novelty.

It's important to remember that for Thucydides
history did not exist as a separate discipline with a carefully
worked out traditional methodology and examples. Beyond Herodotus
and a few others, there was no major tradition to inform him how
history (of the sort he required) should or should not be written.
So there were no conventions for that most elementary of historical
narrative techniques, delivering a precise time framework. Even
the (for us) very elementary principle of telling events by reference
to a standard chronology of months and years did not exist for
Thucydides, since there was no standard calendar in Greece. And
thus Thucydides had to invent his own time scheme (as he himself
tells us).

Once again, if we reflect upon the earlier
narratives we read, we can see that this scrupulous attention
to the time sequence is of little account before Thucydides. Homer
and the Old Testament writers may stress the sequence of events,
but we are never all that aware of just how many days or years
particular events took, except occasionally. We have grave doubts
at times about the veracity of the times given to us (like the
ages of the patriarchs). But we can see, upon reflection, that
for the effect of these stories, such a careful attention to time
is irrelevant. What's important is the story itself. Whether it
is factually or chronologically credible or coherent is a distant concern;
what makes the stories credible are their emotional impact, their
characters, relationships, conflicts, and outcomes and how these
embody a vision of the world. Whether that narrative actually
happened, or happened in exactly that way, is not a key factor
upon which the meaning or the importance of the story necessarily
depends. That is one reason why in the world of myth, there might
be two or three or four versions of the same story, all equally
"true" (e.g., the stories about Helen of Troy, some
of which factually contradict others).

C. History and Myth

In making these demands, then, Thucydides
is driving a large rational wedge between an old and new way of
telling stories. He is insisting that "poetic" stories
do not meet the most important criteria of truth. He is, in other
words, delineating an essential difference between what we call
myth, saga, folk tale, epic and what we call history.

Now, the word history has an interesting
double meaning. On the one hand, it simply means a story, as,
for example, in the phrase "the history of my family"
or "the history of the Trojan War." On the other hand,
the term history also refers to a certain form of rational disciplined
enquiry, a way of studying and evaluating such stories, or determining
which stories are worthy of attention because they are true and
which are simply romance or fancy. Before Thucydides, so far as
we can tell, there was little attention paid to making a distinction
between these two. An old, famous, story which people liked was
history; its truth was determined by the belief it generated,
by the insights it revealed. Hence, the truth of something was
independent of any checks on whether there was evidence to support
the description of the facts.

Thucydides is insisting that there is an
important distinction to be drawn between real history, that is,
a narrative which meets the criteria he sets down and earlier
histories, which he does not consider to be the proper form of
historical enquiry. Such earlier accounts may be popular, but
they are not the real thing, because they do not subject their
historical accounts to the studied discipline of empirical enquiry.

He is aware, in making this demand, that
he is removing from history one of its most popular ingredients.
But in the name of truth, such demands have to be made:

This history may not be the most delightful
to hear, since there is no mythology in it. But those who want
to look into the truth of what was done in the past . . . those
readers will find this History valuable enough. . . . (13)

This hard-headed facticity (to use a horrible
but accurate Germanism) is the quality which has made Thucydides,
for many people, the first real historian in the Western tradition,
the first for whom accounts of the past did not count unless they
satisfied rational criteria by which the facts were evaluated.
It's that quality that enables the eighteenth century philosopher
Hume to observe the following:

. . . the first page of Thucydides is, in
my opinion, the commencement of real history. All preceding narrations
are so intermixed with fable, that philosophers ought to abandon
them, to the embellishments of poets and orators. (Hume, Of
the Populousness of Ancient Nations)

Parenthetically, one might observe there
that this requirement for facticity in history has often been
seen as a limitation on its power. Aristotle, for example, felt
that history was less philosophical than tragedy (i.e., further
from the truth), because the historian is not, like the dramatist,
free to shape the narrative exactly in accordance with his inspiration;
for the historian has to respect the facts of the case. Dr Johnson
has a similar opinion, seeing in the work of the historian something
that is not an exercise of the most creative powers of the mind.

D. The Forces of History

But there's another very marked feature
of Thucydides's style which also contributes to making his writing
a distinctly new voice and, in many respects, the first great
historian. And that is that he brings the causative forces in
the historical process firmly into the sphere of human behaviour.

Let me explain this point in a little more
detail. From historians we moderns expect more than just a verification
of the facts and a comprehensible time scale. We also expect some
explanation for why things happen, some attention to the motive
forces of historical events. Why did the Peloponnesian War occur?
Why did the Athenians behave the way the did? Why didn't they
behave in other ways? And so on.

Now, almost all narratives pay some attention
to this, and Homer and the Old Testament are no exception. But
in those texts, the major motive forces of the narrative generally lie outside
the sphere of human behaviour; they are driven by divine forces
external to human agents (Zeus, the fates, Dike, Yahweh); moreover,
these forces are for the most part thoroughly irrational--they
do not appear to operate by consistent rational principles. In
other words, the historical process, in the last resort, lies
beyond human understanding and control. We can describe what the
gods do, we can occasionally speculate about the possible
motives, but because we are dealing with gods and not human beings
our understanding of the principles or patterns behind such actions
is limited.

With all of this Thucydides will have nothing
whatsoever to do. For him, as he announces very early in the book,
understanding the driving events of history does not require appeals
to divine inscrutability or (as in Herodotus) some divine pattern of moral
meaning stamped on events and everything to do with understanding
human nature. Hence, his narrative forces us to confront the way
in which the historical process is driven, not by some divine
plan or divine emotion, but by decisions and actions human beings
undertake for their own very human reasons. This is, in other
words, a total secularization of our understanding of the past.
What Thucydides is clearly saying from the opening of this book
is something like the following: "From my book, by paying
close attention to what human beings really did in the past and
their very human reasons for acting in this way, you will come
to understand something about the permanent features of human
nature, including your own."

This sometimes contemptuous dismissal of
an appeal to oracular, divine, or otherwise non-human reasons
for the motive forces of history gives to Thucydides's analysis
a profoundly modern tone. Understanding the past is a matter of
understanding how human beings behave for their very human reasons.
If oracles and prophecies play a role in history, that is not
because they have any inherent truth, any pipeline to the way
things really are; they matter only because of the construction
human beings put on their utterances for very human reasons.

From Homer, the tragedians, and Herodotus,
Thucydides could learn about the importance of divine interference
in human affairs and about the important moral lessons to be derived
from past stories. But Thucydides, very much in the rational spirit
of the new age of the mid-century, will have nothing to do with
such irrational theories of causation. For him, if we are to understand
history, we begin and end with a study of what motivates human
beings in action. History, in other words, is to be understood
in terms of the eternal well springs of human conduct, unattractive
as they may be.

And what are these human reasons? Well,
about that Thucydides has no doubt. The great motive forces in
human history are an ineradicable love of power and an inescapable
fear of other people's power. These are the touchstones of human
conduct, and if we want to understand the historical process,
we have to understand that no matter how narratives of the past
have presented the events, the realities were either a quest for
power or a fear of someone else's power.

Power, of course, means the power to get
one's own way, the power to instill fear in other people. Hence,
if we want to understand why Agamemnon was the leader of the expedition
to Troy, we must abandon all notions that the myths provide about
promises to Helen's father or whatever: he was the leader because
he had the most power, the most ships. To find out the truth of
the past, we need to look at the size of the different navies,
the numbers of troops available, the economic resources of a community
and forget about all such things as the favour of the gods or
divine punishment for sin or oracular prophecy. Those cities with
large navies, impressive economic resources, and a lot of troops
are going to drive the historical process far more than cities
with few power resources.

It is not the case that Thucydides was a
cynical intellectual, always determined to reduce human nature
to its lowest common denominator. Indeed, an important theme running
through the book is the way in which war, and particularly civil
war, creates conditions in which what is most worthwhile in human
life is placed inexorably in jeopardy because in warfare the most
selfish and brutal elements of human life become the ruling principles.
The ruling tone in Thucydides is not cynicism, therefore, but
a deep and abiding tragic pessimism: human nature being what it
is, the finest achievements of civilization will again and again
inevitably destroy themselves. He is, if you like, a realist,
if by that we mean someone who wants to explain events by the
practical realities of life all around us. He is, no doubt, reductive,
powerfully forcing our understanding of events into his scheme
of self-interest, fear, and power. But so acute is this perception,
we may complain about important things being left out, but it
is difficult for us to deny the truth of what is there.

E. The Shape of History

Given this view of history, that the historical
process is deeply rooted in the psychology of human beings and
their inevitable acquiescence to the human realities of power
and fear, Thucydides can see in his history an eternal lesson
for all his readers. Since human nature is not going to change
and since there is no such thing as a metaphysical interference
in the historical process, the details of his account are going
to repeat themselves. This point gives him the confidence to make
what, on the face of it, may appear the most arrogant statement
ever written by a historian:

But those who want to look into the truth
of what was done in the past--which, given the human condition,
will recur in the future, either in the same fashion or nearly
so--those readers will find this History valuable enough, as this
was composed to be a lasting possession and not to be heard for
a prize at the moment of a contest. (13)

Now, I want to focus on this point for a
moment, because it calls attention to a third quality we demand
of the historian, in addition to a verification of the facts and
some account of the motive forces in history, namely, some sense
of the shape or direction of the historical narrative.

For an important part of the historian's
task has traditionally been not merely to present and confirm
exactly what happened and to suggest the immediate causal forces.
We also have expected the historian to fit what he or she has
to say into a very much larger framework, a sense of the direction
or purpose or shape to the historical process itself. Put another
way, we want to see how this particular narrative fits in relation
to a much wider overall perspective of the unfolding of human
history.

By way of clarifying this point, let us
consider for a moment the stories we read in the Old Testament.
It is clear that the events there we are encouraged to see as
part of an overall historical scheme, a driving forward of the
narrative events towards a final purpose, the establishment of
God's kingdom on earth, the promised land of God's chosen people,
the Israelites. There is, in other words, a very strong sense
of linear purpose in those Old Testament stories, a push that
is picked up, as we shall see, in the New Testament and reaches
its most fervent expression in the last text of the Bible, the
Book of Revelations. History is linear in the sense that we are
moving ahead, into different places, different events. If we look
back, we will see a clear sense of a forward-thrusting direction.

In this conception history is strongly linear
and it has a destination, an end point where history, in effect,
ceases. An even though we might dismiss much of the Old Testament
as history, on the ground that there is no verification of events
and that the time sequence is often unclear, we still can see
that it gives a very powerful shape to the overall process, a
progressive hope that history is, for all the trials and tribulations,
leading us eventually to the promised land, the establishment
of God's kingdom on earth. This sense of a forward thrusting direction
to history becomes extremely important in our culture, both in
its Biblical form and later when it gets secularized. One of the
great sources of the aggressiveness of Western Culture, nowhere
more so than in North America, has been our faith that our historical
success, especially over nature or others, in short, anything
that gets in the way of our "mission," was both evidence
for and to be explained in terms of the progressive triumph of
certain ways of life, a means of bringing us closer to the establishment
of God's kingdom on earth.

Now, it is clear that Thucydides' notion
of history is not like this. He regards history and the things
that matter most in history as more or less static. Human nature
does not change. Power relations do, and thus there will always
be winners and losers. But there is no gradual transformation
of that process manifesting itself event by event. What has happened
in the past will largely repeat itself. That for him is the shape
of the process, and that is why he thinks what he has to say really
matters, because we can perhaps learn from the events of the war
better what we are (and what will inevitably happen again).

So for Thucydides, as for other Greek thinkers,
if we are going to talk about a direction to history, that direction
is not, as it is in the Old Testament, a strongly forward thrusting,
divinely inspired force. It is something repetitive, perhaps,
in some writers, marked even by a sense of slow decline or even
circularity. The past thus matters, not because it will help us,
by some imaginative extrapolation figure out how far we have come
so that we can rededicate ourselves to the transforming future,
but rather because, with conditions basically unchanged, we can
recognize ourselves and our present situation in the old events.

F. The Hebrew and the Greek Imagination

At the risk of digressing somewhat, I'd
like to expand a bit on this contrast between the Old Testament
view of history and what we find in Thucydides (and in other Greek
writers) because it goes to the heart of a powerful ambiguity
we in the West have inherited from our Hebrew and Greek origins.
It has to do with conflicting notions of what lies at the heart
of the way we understand the world around us, including our history.

At the risk of making this too over simple,
I can repeat a very old observation: that the Hebrew imagination
was overwhelmingly dynamic and temporal, whereas the Greek imagination
was overwhelmingly spatial. Like all generalizations, this is
dangerous, but it might serve to offer some illumination and coordinate
a bit some of the reading we have done in Liberal Studies this
semester.

What I mean by this, at a very general level,
we can best understand from our reading. The Israelites, it should
be clear, placed no great stress on the outward appearance of
things or on understanding the world with the sort of spatial
clarity we see in Euclid or in Greek art. For them what mattered
was dynamic action: moving, making, fighting, transforming. There
are very few external descriptions of people or places in the
Old Testament, and when we do learn something about dimensions
and design, such a passage tends to come, as in the latter part
of Exodus, as part of an urgent instruction to build something
(a blueprint for action).

Yahweh himself has no clearly defined outline,
and the Israelites are expressly forbidden to think of him in
visual terms. What matters about Yahweh is his voice. And when
God speaks, things happen. What matters in life is our relationship
with that commanding voice or its utterances, especially in relation
to an ongoing dynamic plan to move the Israelites from place to
place, from battle to battle, in the right direction, heading
toward the promised land, in fulfillment of covenant.

In comparison with this enormously dynamic,
time-driven sense of life and the divine, the Greek view, as we
have experienced it in Homer, the tragedians, Plato, and Thucydides
is far more static, visual, and spatial, much more, if you like,
geometric. The spatial relations between things, the dimensions
and appearance of heroes or the gods are vital indications of
their importance, and in this matter the beauty of appearance
is paramount (and often that is a matter of geometrical ratio).
When we think of Greek religion, we immediately think of the spatial
manifestations of that in statues and temples in which the influence
of geometric proportions is very pronounced.

When we read Plato, we recognize the central
desire for a reality, a truth beyond the dynamic uncertainty of
change, a reality that lies outside the historical process, something
which is eternally true. What changes cannot be true. When we
read the Old Testament we recognize that the truth of something
is confirmed by the historical process; in fact, the unrolling
of history is our contact with the divine, our confirmation that
the divine exists.

As Westerners, we are inheritors of both
of these notions of historical reality, and in large part our
understanding of ourselves has moved back and forth between the
two of them. This may indeed have made our historical imaginations
at times perplexed and contentious, but a good deal of what the
West has become is understandable, at least in part, in the light
of this divided legacy, summed up by Thorleif Boman as follows:
"In that sense, Hebrew and Greek thinking are complementary;
the Greeks describe reality as being, the Hebrews as movement.
Reality is, however, both at the same time; this is logically
impossible, and yet it is correct."

G. The Peloponnesian War
as a Dramatic Structure

A final important point to make about Thucydides's
great book has little to do with his vision of the historical
process but a lot to do with how the author emphasizes for us
the salient features of his vision. I refer here to the extremely
dramatic nature of Thucydides's style and the structure of his
narrative, which, in many respects, bears unmistakable similarities
to the narrative structure of some of the plays we have read,
particular the tragedies.

For the Peloponnesian War, although
it is unfinished, is very carefully structured. Thucydides does
not simply catalogue the events and reduce each phase to the crassest
workings of fear, power, and self-interest. For him, quite clearly,
Athens, especially the city of Pericles, represented a magnificent
achievement. This he celebrates in what is probably the most famous
part of the book, the Funeral Oration of Pericles (39), which
I hope the seminars are going to discuss in some detail. By the
end of the book, the achievement which that great speech hails
lies in ruins, not because the gods have intervened against Athens
or because there is some ancient curse or because the oracles
have foretold the disaster but rather because the people of Athens
failed in some important way. The war took over their lives and
unleashed the destructive forces latent in society which entirely
compromised the ideals the city was allegedly defending. So the
great tribute to Athens turns into the disastrous failure of the
Sicilian Expedition--the greatest single disaster every suffered
by a Greek polis. The structure of the story is not unlike that
of Oedipus, who begins supremely confident of his goodness, power,
and wisdom as he moves to deal with a crisis and who ends staggering
away blinded horribly by his own hands.

This gives to Thucydides's history a strongly
dramatic quality, which comes out in a number of different ways.
Like so much of Homer, a great deal of the Peloponnesian War
is taken up with dramatic confrontations in which the central
issues of the war are presented to us as a debate, a confrontation
between two speaking personalities. This technique raises at once
the question about the legitimacy of this procedure in historical
writing, since, as Thucydides himself admits, clearly he was not
present at many of the arguments and, even if he was, he probably
had no way of getting verbatim transcripts:

What particular people said in their speeches,
either just before or during the war, was hard to recall exactly,
whether they were speeches I heard myself or those that were reported
to me at second hand. I have made each speaker say what I thought
the situation demanded, keeping as near as possible to the general
sense of what was actually said. (13)

Given Thucydides's contempt for romantic
history and his statements about the importance of verified evidence,
this practice would appear to be unacceptable. But Thucydides's
purpose is clear. He wants his narrative to be dramatically alive,
to come to the reader with the vitality and force of a section
of Homer or Euripides. Strictly speaking, the speeches are not
necessary. He could easily have replaced them with passages analyzing
motives and probable causes (as he does, for example, in dealing
with the Civil War in Corcyra). But for Thucydides, as for so
many Greek writers, the only way to bring an issue fully to the
imagination of the reader was to dramatize it, even at the expense
of historical veracity. This constant reference to human speech,
argument, decision making is, of course, one very important way
Thucydides constantly reminds us of the human dimension from which
all the really important events originate And the enduring power
of Thucydides's work, and especially the most famous parts of
it, the dialogues, are a testament to the fact that he was right,
even if, by our much more stringent rules of permissible evidence,
such use of invented speeches is quite inappropriate. We can imagine
the work without the speeches, but we can also at once appreciate
that it would not be the same.

Of course, from one perspective, Thucydides's
speeches do fit his criteria for verification. They did take place.
People stood up and argued the different sides of an issue, and
they reached a decision. So there is some factual basis for the
event, even if the transcripts are not verbatim.

A second factor which really brings out
the dramatic quality of Thucydides's style is the overall structure
of the narrative, which one can easily compare to the structure
of a dramatic tragedy, starting with the hero (Athens) at the
very pinnacle of success, fame, and confidence, and culminating
in the last act, when inevitable disasters which originated in
the very glory and success of the hero overcome him utterly. Books
Six and Seven of the Peloponnesian War, those sections dealing
with the Sicilian Expedition are obviously very carefully crafted
to represent such an overwhelming catastrophe, bringing to nothing
the noblest dreams of Pericles early on in the book. Of course,
Thucydides's narrative does not end at this point (nor did the
war), but the final chapter of the Peloponnesian War is
clearly not written with the same firm sense of style and purpose.
To some extent, they suggest that the main artistic push is over.

And finally a third technique Thucydides
characteristically uses is a set piece description or dialogue,
in which he pauses in the often rather crammed narrative to offer
an extended look at a particular event, often one far away, but
always something that will bring out dramatically his principal
themes.

The effect of these is to create a continuing
sense that history is a matter of human beings in action, particular
individuals making specific decisions for very human reasons,
and in the course of a long war, losing touch with the best forces
of communal life as one mistake follows another, a shattered illusion
is replaced by another even more tenuous, and social life degenerates
into an increasingly anarchic and internecine scramble for individual
security.

The famous Funeral Oration of Pericles,
is a relatively insignificant event in the history of the war,
but an essential part of Thucydides's dramatic purpose: the clear
definition of the self-image the hero possessed at the start of
his story. And the immediate juxtaposition of this famous high
point with the description of the plague makes clear just how
important it is to Thucydides for his readers to see that the
unfolding of this war represents an eternal human drama and not
simply a specific historical event. For the plague in Thucydides
is much more than simply a disastrous epidemic. It is a symbol
for the war itself. And the effects of the plague, particularly
the way in which it so quickly destroyed the ancient traditions
which kept society functioning, are an early announcement of the
effect of this war. Similarly, the graphic description of the
Civil War in Corcyra takes on an importance far greater than the
strategic event in the overall context of the war: the extended
passage works as a vision of what warfare does to all forms of
civilized life, to families, neighbours, language, customs, in
short, to the entire fabric of peaceful living.

Thucydides is also aware that war is of
all human endeavour the most unpredictable, not just because chance
comes into play, but more importantly because war affects the
way people behave. Once it gains momentum it alters people's most
important traditional priorities and thus renders problematic
the very basis of social living. We may think we have learned
a great deal about warfare and about human psychology in the time
since Thucydides. We may occasionally be led into thinking that
we have somehow "progressed" beyond the destructive
concerns of ancient peoples. We may even be seduced into believing
that modern enlightenment notion (from von Clauswitz) that war
is simply policy by other means, that is, something we can turn
off and on like a tap. As we contemplate the events of various
modern wars (e.g., Vietnam or the present Balkan conflict), Thucydides
is an eloquent reminder that in our zeal to think better of ourselves
and to console ourselves with our rational control over ancient
mysteries, we may have forgotten some eternal truths about why
we behave the way we do and therefore about who we really are.